It's time to get a guide up on topical research, as it's something I've been focusing on for the last couple of years. I actually do keyword research in terms of caring about the metrics of a keyword, nowadays, I'm also focused on picking a topic and trying to cover it, and you should too. I'm hoping this is not too much of a mess of text. I'm tired, so I hope it all flows properly!
For this article, we're going to use a well-defined and popular entity. Baseball bats. I know little about baseball bats, and as I write this, I'm slowly fearing how big this topic likely is and, as such, how long this article may turn out to be...
Ok, so first things first: I mentioned that a baseball bat is an entity.
I can tell this is an entity because it's in Google's Knowledge Graph. Here are a few ways I can tell:
knowledge panel in SERPS.
Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph. SOURCE
I can also check Google’s Knowledge Graph API explorer to get more data on what Google has on this thing.
{
"resultScore": 11242.64453125,
"result": {
"detailedDescription": {
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat",
"articleBody": "A baseball bat is a smooth wooden or metal club used in the sport of baseball to hit the ball after it is thrown by the pitcher. By regulation it may be no more than 2.75 inches in diameter at the thickest part and no more than 42 inches in length. ",
"license": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip...s_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License"
},
"description": "Sports equipment",
"name": "Baseball bat",
"@id": "kg:/m/03g8mr",
"image": {
"url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_bat.svg",
"contentUrl": "https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/...3JoDlEWlRkOpwj4euY07SnLc46ZD4kLUD8Zhbz-_LCLoV"
},
"@type": [
"Thing"
]
In the quote above, you can see a few things such as its ID, entity type (thing), description, etc. one of the most important aspects is the Wikipedia URL. You can pretty much do most of your topical research using the main Wikipedia article to get a good sense of how everything is related.
So why does it matter that a baseball bat is an entity? Well, because it's a uniquely defined thing, it's fairly easy to find out about the topic as a whole. Because it's a unique thing, there's a Wikipedia article on the topic, and as such, you can get a great overview of the important elements that are related to baseball bats.
Wikipedia and Trusted Sources for Topic Mapping
Ok, so now we can get down to getting some background knowledge on our entity and start to note how we're going to map everything out.
Below are some common ways to describe an object that you should be able to use for essentially any entity. There's more that you can think of, but this is a good start.
Now let's move onto the Wikipedia page.
So if we take a look at the contents, you'll notice we've got some great topics that are obviously important to the topic of bats:
1 Terminology
2 History
2.1 Innovations
3 Materials and manufacture
4 Environmental threat to ash wood
5 Regulations
6 Care and maintenance
7 Fungo bat 8 See Also
All of these are topics we'd likely need to discuss/cover in order to show topical authority. Don't forget, you'll likely need to dive into these topics also. On a broad level, each one of these is probably good enough to be a main pillar article.
To find related entities, what you want to do is read the page and look for terms that look related that you could expand on. It's hard to explain so I'll share some examples that I'd take note of. Hyperlinks are sometimes a good place to look, but not everything will be super related. I will search for a term on Google and see if SERPS are showing me relevant info articles on a term. So I'm looking at the innovations section and searched banana and mushroom bat, and the results aren't great so it's not something I'd likely explore further other than talking about it perhaps in a general "innovations of baseball bats" article.
Axe Bat™ found in the same section is showing great relevant results in SERP. I'll make a note of this because it looks like something I can expand into further. I can tell this quickly by seeing the wide range of People Also Ask queries. This looks likes a topic we can write several articles on in detail.
In the Materials and Manufacturing section I've take note to research further into questions like "who manufacturers baseball bats" (in the see also section there's actually a link to a page that list them here, I bet there's heaps of questions about specific bats and manufacturers) and "what's the best type of wood for baseball bats?" Just by experience of doing keyword research I know there's likely heaps of questions around this section. Why? Because it's an important aspect of a bat and people looking to purchase a bat likely have a lot of questions surrounding this topic. You'll likely find a fair amount of informative and commercial intent style keywords.
Another few examples in the article I like the look of and think are worth exploring:
With a little work reading over Wikipedia you can get a good idea of what makes up the topic of your entity and various related entities you can expand in to. Now you have this list you can now start keyword research. But I'm not talking about using a tool that spits out keywords that are "low competition/KD" or "high monthly searches". Forget those, what you need is just data. You need big list of queries people are searching for on each topic.
Bonus - How to find even more related entities on Wikipedia!
Not sure if people are aware but there's a way to show you every single Wikipedia article that links to another article! This is super cool as you can find closely related entities to yours.
That's a lot of pages! Many won't be relevant enough to write articles on but many will. What I like to do is visit every page and find where the link is (can use find feature in browser to search keyword), get an idea of the context and whether it's relevant to my main entity. You might find patterns over time where multiple pages that are linking to the main page are related that could work as an article.
Some quick examples of topics I could look into just looking at a few pages include:
Learning About Products
One can look at major retail stores online to get an idea of features and attributes of products you're exploring. Let's go on DICK's Sporting Goods page for bats.
You get a great deal of info here that you can make note of when you do your keyword research. Let's look at the top of the page.
Wood bats and fungo bats are two terms we've seen before on the Wikipedia article but the other ones we've not. So what do we do? We make a note of all of them to research later. Maybe they're specific to a certain league? Whatever they are there's certainly content to write about them. I bet there's comparison questions people look for like BBCOR vs USSSA bats etc. (I have no clue what either stand for or whether they're related, just an example).
For those in the product review game then you'll likely have your standard best x terms. Best BBCOR bat, best USSSA bat etc. I'd imagine.
OK, moving on to the filters.
Nice long list of brands, I bet we can find plenty of info and commercial intent keywords. Best AXE baseball bat, best adidas baseball bat etc. comparison keywords comparing brands as well will likely be popular.
There's a little information on the Wikipedia article about length of bats but that's mainly talking about regulations. We can see there's a wide variety of lengths. Questions that come to mind "how to measure/pick baseball bat length" and for commercial intent keywords like best 32" baseball bat etc. I assume are popular terms people are looking for. Make a note once again, we shall do research on baseball bat lengths.
Same thing again with the rest of these filters. These are important features of baseball bats and as such likely have a lot of queries we can answer.
So, after looking at just 2 websites and knowing nothing about baseball bats we know have a broad understanding of the topic of baseball bats. Now, to really cover the topic and achieve topical authority we now need to do keyword research on every topic/feature etc. we made note of. Just using the store filters above we know we will need to discuss the following when it comes to bats:
Doing Keyword Research
This isn't really a keyword research article, it'd be too long haha, so I'm just going to mention a few methods I use nowadays. You don't need fancy expensive tools. I don't use keyword grouping tools but it's probably useful when dealing with thousands of keywords.
I use data Google gives me on SERP and not much more:
All of these you can find for free. Some tools I like to use, some may be free/paid/freemium but shouldn't be too expensive
So what you need to do is basically do keyword research for all of your terms you listed. It's going to be heaps of keywords but this is what it takes to get topical authority. This is just for one topic, you might have a site on baseball. So you'd want to do research on balls and gloves etc. Don't neccessairly worry about writing queries that make sense into Google. See below for what I mean, you can find perfectly good results with terms like "baseball bat length"
I've run out of images I can attach now, I was going to share a screenshot from Keywords Everywhere, they have a neat overlay on SERPS which shows you long tails etc. Here's a copy/paste of the list from long tails:
"Keyword"
"baseball bat length chart"
"baseball bat length by height"
"baseball bat length by age"
"baseball bat length for 8 year old"
"baseball bat length in meters"
"baseball bat length for 10 year old"
"baseball bat length in feet"
"baseball bat length for 11 year old"
"baseball bat length in cm"
"average baseball bat length"
"proper baseball bat length"
"youth baseball bat length"
"how to measure baseball bat length"
"high school baseball bat length"
"mlb baseball bat length"
"normal baseball bat length"
"professional baseball bat length"
"best baseball bat length"
It's not hard to find hundreds/thousands of keywords for free/cheap. Do this for all the terms/features you've made note of and congrats you can cover a topic in a heap of detail. Don't forget some terms will also have keywords within them. Metal baseball bats will have same sort of questions as generic baseball bat questions.
I've not talked about metrics like search volume or competition at all because I think they're sort of pointless. Your job should be to establish topical authority and cover a niche. There's not much point exlcuding terms because you think they don't have demand or are too hard to rank for. All your articles will help each other. It's also pretty obvious which terms are going to be higher volume/difficulty. Just look at the SERP ranked pages and length of keyword. "Best baseball bat" is going to be harder than "best baseball bat for cold weather".
Ok, I'm done. I hope this actually made sense and all flowed. Hopefully you can now know how to analyze a topic and create a decent gameplan on how to create topical authority.
GOOD LUCK!
For this article, we're going to use a well-defined and popular entity. Baseball bats. I know little about baseball bats, and as I write this, I'm slowly fearing how big this topic likely is and, as such, how long this article may turn out to be...
Ok, so first things first: I mentioned that a baseball bat is an entity.
- How do I know this?
- Why does it matter?
I can tell this is an entity because it's in Google's Knowledge Graph. Here are a few ways I can tell:
knowledge panel in SERPS.
Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph. SOURCE
I can also check Google’s Knowledge Graph API explorer to get more data on what Google has on this thing.
{
"resultScore": 11242.64453125,
"result": {
"detailedDescription": {
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_bat",
"articleBody": "A baseball bat is a smooth wooden or metal club used in the sport of baseball to hit the ball after it is thrown by the pitcher. By regulation it may be no more than 2.75 inches in diameter at the thickest part and no more than 42 inches in length. ",
"license": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip...s_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License"
},
"description": "Sports equipment",
"name": "Baseball bat",
"@id": "kg:/m/03g8mr",
"image": {
"url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_bat.svg",
"contentUrl": "https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/...3JoDlEWlRkOpwj4euY07SnLc46ZD4kLUD8Zhbz-_LCLoV"
},
"@type": [
"Thing"
]
In the quote above, you can see a few things such as its ID, entity type (thing), description, etc. one of the most important aspects is the Wikipedia URL. You can pretty much do most of your topical research using the main Wikipedia article to get a good sense of how everything is related.
So why does it matter that a baseball bat is an entity? Well, because it's a uniquely defined thing, it's fairly easy to find out about the topic as a whole. Because it's a unique thing, there's a Wikipedia article on the topic, and as such, you can get a great overview of the important elements that are related to baseball bats.
Wikipedia and Trusted Sources for Topic Mapping
Ok, so now we can get down to getting some background knowledge on our entity and start to note how we're going to map everything out.
Below are some common ways to describe an object that you should be able to use for essentially any entity. There's more that you can think of, but this is a good start.
- Types - Are they're different varieties? By size, weight, material etc.
- Materials
- Brands/Manufacturers
- Uses
- Comparisons
- Wood vs metal bats etc.
- What types of materials are used
- Are there different sizes (adult/child etc.)
- Are there different weights (adult/child etc.)
- Are there bats used for different situations, playstyles, players etc.
- What baseball bat does player/team use?
- Regulation standard of bat?
- What are the main brands/manufacturers
Now let's move onto the Wikipedia page.
So if we take a look at the contents, you'll notice we've got some great topics that are obviously important to the topic of bats:
1 Terminology
2 History
2.1 Innovations
3 Materials and manufacture
4 Environmental threat to ash wood
5 Regulations
6 Care and maintenance
7 Fungo bat 8 See Also
All of these are topics we'd likely need to discuss/cover in order to show topical authority. Don't forget, you'll likely need to dive into these topics also. On a broad level, each one of these is probably good enough to be a main pillar article.
To find related entities, what you want to do is read the page and look for terms that look related that you could expand on. It's hard to explain so I'll share some examples that I'd take note of. Hyperlinks are sometimes a good place to look, but not everything will be super related. I will search for a term on Google and see if SERPS are showing me relevant info articles on a term. So I'm looking at the innovations section and searched banana and mushroom bat, and the results aren't great so it's not something I'd likely explore further other than talking about it perhaps in a general "innovations of baseball bats" article.
Axe Bat™ found in the same section is showing great relevant results in SERP. I'll make a note of this because it looks like something I can expand into further. I can tell this quickly by seeing the wide range of People Also Ask queries. This looks likes a topic we can write several articles on in detail.
In the Materials and Manufacturing section I've take note to research further into questions like "who manufacturers baseball bats" (in the see also section there's actually a link to a page that list them here, I bet there's heaps of questions about specific bats and manufacturers) and "what's the best type of wood for baseball bats?" Just by experience of doing keyword research I know there's likely heaps of questions around this section. Why? Because it's an important aspect of a bat and people looking to purchase a bat likely have a lot of questions surrounding this topic. You'll likely find a fair amount of informative and commercial intent style keywords.
Another few examples in the article I like the look of and think are worth exploring:
- Bats for different leagues/age groups
- High School
- Little League
- Pine tar
- Gorilla Gold Grip Enhancer
- Care and maintenance
- Boning
- Fungo bat
- Baseball doughnut
- Composite baseball bat
- Pink bat
With a little work reading over Wikipedia you can get a good idea of what makes up the topic of your entity and various related entities you can expand in to. Now you have this list you can now start keyword research. But I'm not talking about using a tool that spits out keywords that are "low competition/KD" or "high monthly searches". Forget those, what you need is just data. You need big list of queries people are searching for on each topic.
Bonus - How to find even more related entities on Wikipedia!
Not sure if people are aware but there's a way to show you every single Wikipedia article that links to another article! This is super cool as you can find closely related entities to yours.
That's a lot of pages! Many won't be relevant enough to write articles on but many will. What I like to do is visit every page and find where the link is (can use find feature in browser to search keyword), get an idea of the context and whether it's relevant to my main entity. You might find patterns over time where multiple pages that are linking to the main page are related that could work as an article.
Some quick examples of topics I could look into just looking at a few pages include:
- Self defense
- Woods of baseball bats
- One of the articles that links was on bitter oranges. The linked text?
- "The hard, white or light-yellow wood is used in woodworking and made into baseball bats in Cuba." pretty cool. I may not of found out about this type of wood being used in bats if it had not been for this link.
- One of the articles that links was on bitter oranges. The linked text?
- Baseball bats in TV/movies
Learning About Products
One can look at major retail stores online to get an idea of features and attributes of products you're exploring. Let's go on DICK's Sporting Goods page for bats.
You get a great deal of info here that you can make note of when you do your keyword research. Let's look at the top of the page.
Wood bats and fungo bats are two terms we've seen before on the Wikipedia article but the other ones we've not. So what do we do? We make a note of all of them to research later. Maybe they're specific to a certain league? Whatever they are there's certainly content to write about them. I bet there's comparison questions people look for like BBCOR vs USSSA bats etc. (I have no clue what either stand for or whether they're related, just an example).
For those in the product review game then you'll likely have your standard best x terms. Best BBCOR bat, best USSSA bat etc. I'd imagine.
OK, moving on to the filters.
Nice long list of brands, I bet we can find plenty of info and commercial intent keywords. Best AXE baseball bat, best adidas baseball bat etc. comparison keywords comparing brands as well will likely be popular.
There's a little information on the Wikipedia article about length of bats but that's mainly talking about regulations. We can see there's a wide variety of lengths. Questions that come to mind "how to measure/pick baseball bat length" and for commercial intent keywords like best 32" baseball bat etc. I assume are popular terms people are looking for. Make a note once again, we shall do research on baseball bat lengths.
Same thing again with the rest of these filters. These are important features of baseball bats and as such likely have a lot of queries we can answer.
So, after looking at just 2 websites and knowing nothing about baseball bats we know have a broad understanding of the topic of baseball bats. Now, to really cover the topic and achieve topical authority we now need to do keyword research on every topic/feature etc. we made note of. Just using the store filters above we know we will need to discuss the following when it comes to bats:
- Materials
- Weight
- Construction
- Diameter
- Brands
- Drop
- Certification
- Length
- Leagues
Doing Keyword Research
This isn't really a keyword research article, it'd be too long haha, so I'm just going to mention a few methods I use nowadays. You don't need fancy expensive tools. I don't use keyword grouping tools but it's probably useful when dealing with thousands of keywords.
I use data Google gives me on SERP and not much more:
- Autocomplete
- Trends
- People also ask - this is where the gold is and you can get away with just using this.
- Related searches
- Common sense
- Think about what questions people would use. You can combine different things and simply search them to see if people are looking for combinations like best baseball bat for high schoolers or best 32" baseball bat etc.:
- Age
- Length of bat
- Think about what questions people would use. You can combine different things and simply search them to see if people are looking for combinations like best baseball bat for high schoolers or best 32" baseball bat etc.:
All of these you can find for free. Some tools I like to use, some may be free/paid/freemium but shouldn't be too expensive
So what you need to do is basically do keyword research for all of your terms you listed. It's going to be heaps of keywords but this is what it takes to get topical authority. This is just for one topic, you might have a site on baseball. So you'd want to do research on balls and gloves etc. Don't neccessairly worry about writing queries that make sense into Google. See below for what I mean, you can find perfectly good results with terms like "baseball bat length"
I've run out of images I can attach now, I was going to share a screenshot from Keywords Everywhere, they have a neat overlay on SERPS which shows you long tails etc. Here's a copy/paste of the list from long tails:
"Keyword"
"baseball bat length chart"
"baseball bat length by height"
"baseball bat length by age"
"baseball bat length for 8 year old"
"baseball bat length in meters"
"baseball bat length for 10 year old"
"baseball bat length in feet"
"baseball bat length for 11 year old"
"baseball bat length in cm"
"average baseball bat length"
"proper baseball bat length"
"youth baseball bat length"
"how to measure baseball bat length"
"high school baseball bat length"
"mlb baseball bat length"
"normal baseball bat length"
"professional baseball bat length"
"best baseball bat length"
It's not hard to find hundreds/thousands of keywords for free/cheap. Do this for all the terms/features you've made note of and congrats you can cover a topic in a heap of detail. Don't forget some terms will also have keywords within them. Metal baseball bats will have same sort of questions as generic baseball bat questions.
I've not talked about metrics like search volume or competition at all because I think they're sort of pointless. Your job should be to establish topical authority and cover a niche. There's not much point exlcuding terms because you think they don't have demand or are too hard to rank for. All your articles will help each other. It's also pretty obvious which terms are going to be higher volume/difficulty. Just look at the SERP ranked pages and length of keyword. "Best baseball bat" is going to be harder than "best baseball bat for cold weather".
Ok, I'm done. I hope this actually made sense and all flowed. Hopefully you can now know how to analyze a topic and create a decent gameplan on how to create topical authority.
GOOD LUCK!
